There is something called the Interstate Crosscheck program, which generates master lists of voters in multiple participating states -- and then cross-references similar names registered in more than one state -- to try to identify people attempting voter fraud. They then supply these lists to states so they can go through and purge their voter rolls.
The problem is that this is being administered by people whose motive -- despite what they say -- seems obvious: to gut the lists of those who might tend to vote Democratic. It has been shown that they focus on last names that are common among blacks and Latinos and Asians.
Beyond that, they often just match first and last names and ignore that the middle name or date of birth may be different. What often happens in the states is that the voter registration office will send a post card to the address listed, asking them to contact their office to clarify their data. But, according to this article, the cards often look like the kind of thing that people toss in the trash along with all the other junk mail they receive.
If they do not respond, then they are either dropped from the voting lists, or at best forced to vote a provisional ballot -- and then later have to make a trip to the registration office, along with documents to prove their identity.
“It’s Jim Crow all over again,” says the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery, now 93, says he recognizes in the list of threatened voters a sophisticated new form of an old and tired tactic. “I think [the Republicans] would use anything they can find. Their desperation is rising.”In the state of Virginia alone, over 40,000 names have been removed from voting lists, despite the spurious criteria for matching double voters.
Kansas Secretary of State Kobach, who came to national attention in the debacle about whether he could force the Democratic party to name another candidate after their nominee dropped out, is one of the instigators of the program. When he talks about it, he claims that they match for first, middle, and last names, Jr/Sr, date of birth, and social security number.
In practice, however, names are often marked as suspect simply because they have the same first and last names. John Paul Williams of Alexandria, VA is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia. Just imagine how many people in every state are named John Williams.
Al Jazeera America traced some of these supposed same-person pairs and found them to be false matches. But is anyone doing anything about stopping this outright wholesale attempt on the part of Republican state officials to steal the elections?
Even the New Georgia Project, which registered some 80,000 new voters, is still unable to get an accounting from the Georgia Secretary of State for why 40,000 of those voters have not turned up on the voter rolls -- despite suing in court. All he will say is that they have processed all the registration forms that were correctly filled out.
Forget the painstaking work of tracking all this and undoing all of the false strikes from voters lists. Just think, for a moment. Why would anyone go to all the trouble, not only to register to vote in two different states, but also plan to actually vote in two different states? Does any individual expect that his one vote is that crucial to the outcome that it's worth all that?
This is all just a bunch of Bull-hocky (to use Rachel Maddow's favorite euphemism). But the Republicans' motive is as serious as sin. These perfidious purges could sway the elections in close states.
Even more reason we have to get every vote to the polls with an unprecedented number of toss-up races for the senate -- and therefore who controls the agenda and the committees -- is at stake.
Ralph
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